Tuesday, March 20, 2007

During these last few days I’ve been doing a considerable amount of careful listening, and enjoying it immensely. For instance, I’ve spent some time each day listening to a fine actress reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I settle myself in a comfortable chair, turn on my iPod, and follow along in the book as she tells me the story. What I especially love is the way she delicately alters her voice to fit each of the many characters, making the experience more like attending a play than reading a book. I also find that her voice somehow draws me in to the story more than I might if I were just silently reading the words to myself. Another pleasant listening experience I’ve been having is listening to a superb actor read Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is a poem I have loved for many years, but I’ve never experienced the drama of the story the way I am this week. As I listen to his voice and imagine that it is Milton himself who is speaking the words, I am pulled into the excitement of the great epic. However, the most unusual listening experience I’ve been enjoying lately is old-time radio programs.I found an internet site that has thousands of old shows, and it has been a thrill to put my feet up and go back down the years with these classic programs. Strangely, I find these spoken shows to be far more enchanting than television programs. I can’t literally “see” what’s happening in the story, but with my ears and my imagination I can see in a different and more compellingl way.

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"To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle." -- Walt Whitman

I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

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The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

Visitors to This Blog, June 12, 2009-

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom: "The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett